Last weekend, a mostly abandoned town on the Salton Sea was transformed into a pageantry of art and opera and weirdness.

The three-day Bombay Beach Biennale was free to attend, unpublicized and driven by a mission of local engagement.

Call it the anti-Burning Man.

The idea came from Tao Ruspoli, a Los Angeles filmmaker, who years ago became fascinated by the Salton Sea, a onetime tourist mecca straddling the Imperial and Coachella Valleys that has succumbed to environmental decay.

He started visiting often and even bought a house in Bombay Beach, a speck of a town on the eastern shore.

“This idea of Bombay Beach Biennale popped in my head because rather than play up the sadness of the place,” he said, “I thought it would be more interesting to play on the surrealness of the place…It’s such a mixture of contradictions, of natural and unnatural, of beautiful and ugly.”

Mr. Ruspoli partnered with two friends, Stefan Ashkenazy, an art lover and hotelier, and Lily Johnson White, a philanthropist and member of the Johnson & Johnson family.

Last year, the trio self-funded the inaugural festival, under the theme “Decay,” and invited artists, philosophers, writers and other assorted merrymakers from their network of friends to join. It was a hit.

But rather than simply clear out once the fun was over, the festival has aimed to reinvent some of the abandoned buildings in town as permanent art spaces.

“The ethos is to be playful but also leave a lasting impact to the town,” Mr. Ruspoli said.

The Johnson (and Johnson) family are full of interesting characters, to put it mildly.

Stefan Ashkenazy is the owner of La Petit Ermitage, one of the commercial hotels doing pop-ups at Burning Man VIP camps.

And as for the third player in this trinity, the description of “film maker” doesn’t quite do him justice:

Tao Ruspoli is an Italian American filmmaker, photographer, and musician. Ruspoli is the second son of occasional actor and aristocrat Prince Alessandro Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri and Austrian-American actress Debra Berger. He is the older brother of Bartolomeo dei Principi Ruspoli, second husband of oil heiress Aileen Getty.

This year the Biennale theme was The Way The Future Used To Be. There were more than 100 artists and performers, with attendance “in the hundreds rather than thousands”.

Carmiel Banasky in LA Weekly described the psychedelic space station and other accoutrements:

My first stop at the fest was a Mad Hatter-esque tea party, where cake pops (made by a local family), joints and edibles were passed around while fairy women made bondage art in the branches. Along the beach was a lifeguard stand turned into a psychedelic space station. Colorful smoke bombs set off at sunset through large sea creature cut-outs asked us to remember where we were, while the outdoor bar next door (tended by men in yellow bikini briefs) asked us to forget it.

70,000 Burners might attend this year, but there are now about 700,000 former Burners in the world – so 90%+ of Burners miss out every year.

“The future is in the Regionals!”, say some – but the jury’s still out on that. The one Regional that I’ve visited so far, was nothing like Burning Man, and not even remotely as good as other festivals in the region.

With that in mind, I finally thought of a straight-forward way to implement something that Nomad Traveler and others have been suggesting for a while. If you look at the tab of pages running along the screen, under the header photo, you will notice a new one: Burner Burns. This is a place where collectively, with the magical powers of crowd-sourcing, we may be able to put together a list of alternatives to Burning Man.

Please go to the page and add your favorite events in the comments, I will cut and paste them into the page. We’ll see if enough people contribute for this to become something useful.

Noisey, Vice’s music division, has an amusing look at the different subcultures attached to various festivals. Of course “it’s not a fucking festival” Burning Man gets a mention:

BURNING MAN

You’re having a mid-life crisis, so you decide to leave the materialistic life you lead as a computer programmer behind and split a thousand dollar trailer (with wifi and air conditioning) with some people who will forever be referred to as your “Burning Man Friends.” You buy a vintage top hat and goggles for the affair, you’ve built a sweet art car for cruising the Playa, and you have a friend named Rainbow who is bringing acid from Mexico. Even though you own a Canon EOS Rebel camera, you use a disposable camera to capture the grittiness that IS Burning Man, and you and your fellow Burners use them as #tbts every Thursday for an entire year.

Burners be like “yeah right, acid doesn’t come from Mexico!”

Some other highlights:

COACHELLA

Your dumb friend bought tickets to weekend one instead of weekend two AND RUINED EVERYTHING, so you’ve spent months trying to make the swap. You’re LITERALLY starving yourself to fit into the Free People romper you bought specifically for this occasion—or you’ve spent months doing dumbell bicep curls, barbell bicep curls, hammer bicep curls, and cable bicep curls to fill out that neon Urban tank (SUN’S OUT GUNS OUT, BABY!)—and tell everyone how stoked you are to finally see alt-J. None of your friends knows who alt-J is, and you feel really hip. Hip like a hipster!

OUTSIDE LANDS

Your older brother who works for Google hooked you up with some free tix, and you still think flower crowns are a thing. You haven’t caught on to the fact that San Francisco summers are cold as fuck, so you freeze your ass off in a crochet dress you bought from the H&M Loves Coachella collection. You still think Chromeo is an indie band, and “know a guy” who buried vodka and drugs behind a bush somewhere in Golden Gate Park. You’re also a foodie!

TREASURE ISLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL

You rode on a branded sailboat to the festival while watching Mikal Cronin perform on the boat for a commercial. You love MGMT, and you Instagram the ferris wheel at the festival using the hashtag #NotCoachella. Your molly kicked in at 6 PM while you were dancing in the “silent disco tent” (that exists because it’s zany) with your fellow tech bros.

ULTRA MIAMI

You become sexually aggressive when you hear Steve Aoki, and the tape over your nipples is falling off because you sweat more than the average person. Your kandi is majestic. Unfortunately, you peaked on the party bus on the way there.

SXSW

You are a rapper and you want people to listen to your mixtape, you are a band that thought of a really quirky viral stunt that you can’t wait to pull on Sixth Street, you are a music publicist whose schedule is SO INSANE this week, you are a music writer who is SO OVER South By, you are a brand manager for a deeply uncool household product who heard that SXSW is hip, you are a student at UT who gets how it all works, you are big in the garage rock scene and can remember when this festival was cool, you are Rachel Ray, you are an influencer, you are an #influencer, you are Trae the Truth, you have an app, you are standing in line for Fader Fort, you are certain that you are more important than the other people here, you are a street style blogger, you are a street style icon, you have a college radio show, you are a mid-tier marketing executive at Vevo, you’re an Austin resident just hoping to get out and catch some live music, you are sick of it all and ironically going to PF Chang’s, you just happen to be in town and are unironically going to PF Chang’s, you are someone who’s been coming for years because you love discovering great bands, you are a cultural ambassador for a Scandinavian country, you have a quirky interview show on YouTube, you just lurrrrve breakfast tacos, you can’t believe how cheap beer is here compared to New York, you are hoping to build, you work in social media, you are Wiz Khalifa.